


The Manhunt

by KeelieThompson1



Category: Star Wars - All Media Types
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-01-22
Updated: 2018-01-22
Packaged: 2019-03-08 08:11:16
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,115
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13454073
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/KeelieThompson1/pseuds/KeelieThompson1
Summary: Four years after RotS.Padme wakes up, her memory of the last few weeks of the republic are chaotic and fractured, but that's nothing compared to her discovery of what has happened to her husband.





	The Manhunt

**Author's Note:**

> I was reading this today: https://genius.com/Simon-armitage-the-manhunt-annotated and it seemed to spark something! It's an incredible poem if you haven't read it.

The sensation of waking was not unlike surfacing from deep water. It seemed as if she’d been dimly aware of the surface for ages and was unaware of moving towards it until she suddenly rose up, breaking through and up in a crashing wave if panic.

The baby.

Her hands wouldn’t respond even as Padme blinked up at the light above in confusion. It was a painful, harsh circle that seemed like an eye glaring down at her. It took her a moment to pull her gaze away and stare down at her flat stomach.

No.

Horrified, she tried to move again, but nothing seemed to want to respond to her and her breathing came harsher, painful and panicked as her mind darted to work out what had happened.

Anakin. He’d come back in a shower of glory and commotion, crash landing and swirling her around in a laughing gaze and…she’d told him about the baby and…

He’d been pleased. And scared. Maybe?

Where was the baby?

She turned her head, looking around the room, trying to work out if she should call out. What if she’d been taken? What if they had her baby?

Padme turned her attention back to her body as the thought occurred, dismissing the white clinical room and medical equipment as she tried to re-learn the sensations of her body. It felt foreign and stiff as if disused. 

How long?

She refused to panic. She needed to find her baby-

A jarring, blurred, confusing memory of Obi-Wan Kenobi standing beside her, a tiny baby in his hands as he stared down in worry and she was whispering a name-

No other memory came.

“-must settle down,” the mechanical, disinterested tone of a medical droid commanded. “You are in a distressed state.”

“Where am I,” Padme demanded and couldn’t help the fear that crashed through her when her voice came out weak and rasping. The fear of losing her voice was always one that had haunted her. “Where is this place?”

“You are at Imperial Centre on Alpha base-”

The words made no sort of sense.

“-high priority.”

“Who is in charge?” she asked, coughing to clear her throat and feeling that it made little difference. She needed water.

“Lord-” The droid broke off as the doors swept open to reveal…she didn’t know what was revealed. It looked like it could be human; broad shoulders that few humanoid shaped droids could match even if there was something a little mechanical in the way that the limbs moved. And the way that the man? paused and seemed to almost sway with some emotion caught her painfully.

She didn’t say anything as he moved closer, the medical droid jabbering away in the background. There was something familiar about the movement, the tilt of the head, the unsure hand that reached towards her as if she was a longed for mirage that might vanish into the heat of an unforgiving desert. 

How… She stared at the masked figure, trying to find some hint to confirm or deny (please, stars, let there be some denial that this wasn’t…this couldn’t be…)

“Ani?”

He took hold of her hand that she hadn’t been able to move and bent his head over and for a second, she was momentarily unable to see anything other than the blond head of hair that had bowed over her so often as if she had the answers to the universe inside her that he could unlock with earnest worship.

If she could have, she would have plucked at his shoulder, tried to trace the man from the machine. As it was, she could only stare at him, mind spinning in confusion.

“Ani,” Padme whispered again, “Where’s the baby?”

He jolted as if shocked, but didn’t look up. The helmet remained bent over, but there was a subtle shift into something more like contrition or like he was braced for a blow.

“Leia,” she said, the name both beautiful and tangled on her tongue in a masterclass of frustration because their daughter’s name should have been as natural on her tongue as Anakin’s or her own. “Where’s Leia?”

Slowly, his head raised. “Leia?” he asked and his voice was unrecognisable; heavy and layered with emotion. As she stared at him, she became aware of the heavy breathing and her eyes fell down to the panel at his chest, wondering exactly what it was that had happened to her husband.

“I…I saw her,” Padme said, eyes moving around the room as if Obi-Wan might reappear with her baby. “I named her…my baby…”

He moved forward, a surprisingly smooth motion and a gloved hand touched her temple as gentle as a Nubian moth. Her mind was fogged and confused, but that one moment of clarity was bright and beautiful and her only hope in this confused mess of life.

Even with the breathing equipment, she could hear the moment he skipped a breath. Then Anakin drew away, tight and coiled like a landmine about to be sprung. “Kenobi,” he hissed and the hanging bags giving her sustenance started to tremble, rocking back and forth.

“Ani,” she said again, terrified. “Where is she?”

“I…” he paused and lowered his head. She could just about see his shoulders lowering, smoothing back into a flat line as the tremors in the room came to a stop. His chest didn’t really move, harsh though his breathing was and she stared at it, a new terror rising within her.

“What happened?” she asked, wishing that she could sit up and move to him. “Why…what happened?”

Something shifted within him, away from her and he looked away. “Kenobi,” Anakin said eventually. “He…we duelled. He won.”

What? It must have shown in her expression because Anakin glanced back at her slowly, mask not moving but she knew him well enough to know that he was sending her a searching look. “What do you remember?” he asked.

“I…you came home,” Padme said slowly, knowing that she was missing something vital. “You…were happy?”

He said nothing in response. 

“And then…you were worried…were you happy? About the baby?”

The silence remained heavy between them but then he nodded. Once. A sharp almost violent gesture.

“I was looking for you? Obi-Wan was…worried or upset… and then the baby….” She looked around again. 

“I…was told it had died,” he said without inflection. “That your…injuries had caused the pregnancy to end.”

No. “She was there, she was wriggling in his arms,” she said, determined. “Ani, I know she was-”

He held up a hand and she lost her voice, not because she was obeying the silent command, but because she was so absolutely stunned that he had done it.

“Anakin Skywalker is…” he paused. “I no longer go by that name.” He turned away and then back almost instantly. “You need…medical assistance. A bacta tank for the atrophy.”

“How long?” Padme demanded, mind almost unable to take in anything that he was saying or how he was acting (when had he grown so cold?) 

“Years,” he said in that same unemotional tone. “Four years.”

Four…

The world swum again and it was all too much. Padme found herself crashing back down into the comforting depths once more.

xxx

 

Months later, Padme stood at the window, staring out the city planet that she had known so intimately she was sure she could have navigated her way through in complete darkness. Instead, there were unfamiliar buildings in the distance, a new symbol spread around on the advertising screens. Just in the distance, she could see the senate building.

An Empire.

It had taken a while for that information to sink in. An Empire. The chancellor was now an Emperor and the Jedi were now traitors. Her husband was a Sith Lord and her friends were now loyal in the imperial senate.

No matter what she was told, it didn’t feel right.

She didn’t feel right.

They’d cut her hair when she’d been in the coma; ease of maintenance a droid had frankly told her. Her body was thin and weak and older and she wouldn’t say that the woman in the mirror was unrecognisable, but she’d never seen so many changes in herself at once. Nor felt them.

She’d certainly given birth. 

Anakin…she couldn’t even bring herself to say the other name, had taken up his residency in a military base on the outskirts of Imperial city centre which allowed her some distance from everything. The base seemed to house an army; there were briefing rooms and naval officers on the lower floors, all with high level security passes. The upper floors were less busy and stormtroopers (not clones, Anakin had said neutrally) were on guard at every moment of the day. The whole place was sparse and cold, everything highly functional as if comfort was something to be scoffed at and discarded.

She could hear her husband’s breathing as he stepped close and, not the first time, had a moment of mourning for that Lothcat-like quiet that Anakin had once had.

“You would prefer to be closer?” he asked.

Padme shook her head, turning away from the windows and wrapping her arms around her body, still finding it odd that her arms didn’t land on her swollen stomach. In the months that she’d been awake, it was one sensation that didn’t seem to be fading, this agony of loss.

He watched her, hovering awkwardly and she wondered if he wanted physical touch as much as she did. But, apart from the occasional touch from his hand, he seemed to shy away from her reaching out and point blank refused to explain or detail his physical state other than the ominous ‘I lost a duel’ explanation.

“Where are our rooms?” she asked, wanting to be somewhere smaller, somewhere she could feel hidden. Across from them, the blank gaze of a stormtrooper stared ahead, but she couldn’t shake the feeling that she was being observed.  

He turned on his heel, striding in large paced steps that were a struggle to keep up with, even with her improving health. He was taller now, which seemed ridiculous considering how much taller than her he had been before…well, before. 

They headed to the lift shuttle in silence and she tried her best to ignore the covert curious stares. Her black dress was in-keeping with the endless grey and monochrome colour scheme. 

They exited on an empty looking hallway with a few doors scattered down its sides. Anakin led the way, his breathing echoing off the walls and then seemed to hesitate.

“Our room,” she said with a quiet firmness.

It was the wrong thing to say.

He whirled around, movements almost icy cruel. “Our room?” he asked, voice deep and thunderous. “There is no possible way that we can have ‘our room’-”

“You are my husband,” she started to say and then stopped when he looked away, hands clenched.

“I am…unfit,” he said eventually, mask still facing away from her. “A sith does not…” then he trailed off, going from callous to confused in the time it took him to accelerate a speeder.

“Love?” she asked, her vision jumping and blurring as she swallowed back tears. “Then why am I here?”

“You…” he sounded so lost. “When we find our daughter-”

She shook her head and looked away, unwilling to even think about it because it was an agony unlike anything that she had ever experienced. The longing for that baby that no longer existed and then nightmare of images that haunted her with any number of permutations as to what their daughter might look like. 

“And if…” she almost burned with the words, combusting with longing for her child, “is this what you want her to come home to? To parents-” she stumbled over the word and took a breath, “who don’t speak or communicate or love?”

She knew he took it as a challenge. If she were more stable, more…her, she would have goaded him into it with ease and ridden the stripping sand storm that crashed over her. But now she felt a stab of fear as he almost hissed at her and then marched towards the door furthest away from them.

She moved to follow, shutting the door behind her and taking in the equipment with a horror she was certain that she didn’t manage to disguise, she dragged her gaze to her husband’s bulk as he faltered, an obvious fear rising up within him at her being in this room.

She couldn’t stand it. Padme walked over to him slowly as he remained statue still, his breathing the only thing that indicated that he wasn’t some sort of monument to her fallen husband. She stopped in front of him and leaned her head forward, resting slightly on what may still be his collarbone.

Above her, Padme sensed he moved as if to press his face to his hair, aborting the move as he remembered that he could no longer move in such a way. Instead, his hand came to her hair, heavy, but not uncomfortable.

It was like this. It was always like this. A furious barrier and then a small admittance, but she was still miles away from the man that hid in Vader’s core. 

“I will return her to you,” Anakin promised, his voice as soft as it could be with the mask. “I will bring her home.”

“To us,” she said softly and closed her eyes when he didn’t deny or argue with her. “To both of us.”

Xxx

It took almost three months after that for them to be a family. Months during which Anakin would be gone, hunting Obi-Wan, searching for their daughter, tracking down whispers of rebellion that were impossible for Padme to track.

She met with Chancell- Emperor Palpatine as he was now and felt a wave of horror at the scars that covered his face, at his stooped stance and felt the betrayal once more at what the Jedi order had done. A betrayal that barely made sense, yet remained on the fringes of her world, absorbed as she was with finding herself once more, of digging her husband out of his coffin, of trying not to dream of her daughter.

And then.

Her Leia. Five years old by the time she was gently returned to Padme’s arms, Anakin an awkward lumbering figure, graceless in his mystified awe of their daughter. He lurked close by, watching, but never touching as if she and Leia were made of ice that might shatter.

Their daughter was perfect.

Distressed, but perfect. And Padme spent night after night, sitting with the sobbing child, heart clenching and crumbling every time Leia wailed out for her mother and father; innocently oblivious.

“Where was she?” Padme managed to ask eventually, too absorbed with discovering her daughter’s perfect hands and a tiny birthmark on her neck and Leia’s aversion to the word ‘no’.

“Organa,” Anakin replied tightly, staying three paces away in a distance he had perfected since Leia had been found. 

“Is he still alive?”

Her first thought was that Bail had been killed because Anakin looked away as if embarrassed. “Yes,” he rumbled eventually. “I did not wish her to…to know that. If she had fond memories. He was…she was provided for.”

Padme rested her chin on Leia’s head and nodded. She heard eventually that the royal house had vanished, gone into hiding. Anakin said little about it. She supposed if Bail had joined the rebels, at least Anakin would have a different reason to kill him next time

Eventually Leia forgot there had been another life. Forgot to be scared or curious of Anakin. Within two months, she would follow him around, fascinated and Padme was certain she could feel something flicker between father and daughter. They moved in sync sometimes, tilted their head at the same moment and Leia could paralyse the terrifying Lord Vader with a simple smile.

It became a not so unusual sight to see him standing at the balcony when not on a mission, looking across to Imperial City, Leia in the crook of his arms as she told him something that she had learned in a datafile that day.  Up here, in this space, he was Anakin.

Even if he never responded to the name.

Slowly, he started to respond to other things. He would let her stand close, let her lean in.

It took until their daughter had been with them a year to be allowed to follow him into the oxygen chamber. He gripped the chair so hard that the metal creaked and groaned under his fingers, giving way to his fear.

She said nothing. Simply watched as the mask was lifted off along with the helmet and revealed her husband’s face.

With his eyes tightly closed, she barely recognised him. Gone was the tanned, healthy skin and the thick hair that she had dug her hands into. He was bald now, pale from lack of sun which made ropey scars even starker. He was like chalk, fragile as if he could crumble in her hands if she touched him.

His eyes opened, reluctantly, but he wouldn’t look in her direction. Instead, he pinned his gaze to a spot in the chamber, stonily determined to avoid her gaze.

He flinched when she touched him.

“Did I hurt you?” she asked.

His mouth moved, but (as if remembering something) his lips pressed shut and he simply shook his head softly.

She wondered if she had been the last person to touch him, to have skin on skin contact with him. She traced the scars, the nose that remained but had been reset. Around his mouth, there were heavy scars from where he had breathed in, drawing hot air into his mouth and around his lips. His chin was pitted, uneven and she danced her fingers over it feeling both honoured at his trust and horrified at what had been done to him.

He’d dragged himself, she realised. Burning and dying, he’d dragged himself through the shores of Mustafa and wrecked his chin in the process.

Her hand trailed down to the suit and a still gloved hand caught hers.

He still didn’t look at her.

“I’m not afraid,” she told him softly.

His lips twisted a little in a parody of his old wry smile and she felt a flutter of relief that she could still see those expression on her face, that she was right to picture them when he wore his mask.

“I am,” he said.

His voice was thin and weak and his hand, metal though it was, still spasmed around her as if pained by the sound of it. For a man that had prided himself in his physical capabilities, who still prided himself in it, this had to be…well…difficult.

“Would you like to see her?” Padme asked.

He hesitated. He did, she could tell, but she imagined he didn’t want their daughter to see him like this, to ask questions he wasn’t prepared to answer, couldn’t yet answer.

“She’s asleep,” Padme reminded him. “You can keep her sleeping.”

Anakin’s throat bobbed in a painful swallow. “Next time,” he whispered, voice wheezing out like it was coming from a river reed. She nodded, bending her head to press a kiss to his brow and he flinched again.

xxx

It took him two months to let her see him again. Another three for him to let Leia in, even sleeping and she could see why as he stared at their daughter in naked awe, risking his breathing to press a kiss to her head, to the little frown that tightened the skin above her tiny nose because she was nothing if not stubborn and Leia fought falling asleep with all that she had.

When Leia was seven, Padme stood outside the bacta tank, heart seizing as she finally saw the extent of the damage. The breathing apparatus that was buried in his chest, helping to inflate his exhausted burnt out lungs, the web of scarring around where his limbs met metal. His torso was still firm and muscled, had to be from the weight he was carrying around, but it was a tangled mess of scars as was were the thighs. His back was better, though not unmarred and she wondered if he had turned onto his back when the heat had become absolutely unbearable. 

He left without talking to her. Refused to speak of it when he returned from his mission. Was cold even to Leia for moths following until, slowly, he thawed out again, piece by fragile piece. 

“What happened to Daddy?” Leia would ask in the quiet of the days when Anakin was gone or at night when he hid away.

“He was betrayed,” Padme answered, the memory slipping from her grasp as it always did, “by someone he loved. And that man took you from us.”

“But Daddy found me,” Leia would say, firmly nodding at that part of the story, even as she snuggled in a little more. 

“Yes, he did,” Padme would reply.

Xxx

Sex was…complicated to say the least.

They didn’t ever broach the topic of his scars there. The glimpses and hints she had from the rest of his body suggested that there might be some damage, but she wasn’t sure of the extent and he was never willing to discuss it or try anything. There lay a damaged psyche that she wasn’t sure she’d ever be able to help him with and a battlefield of mines that she couldn’t hope to navigate.

But sometimes, on the rarest of nights that he’d had a good week, or where he’d locked himself away with Leia and Padme, he would come to her room in the night, as shy and nervous as he had been that first time and watch her. He rarely touched, as if he believed he might hurt or taint her, but he would stay close, and there was a flicker of something, as if he were using the force in a way that the Jedi certainly would have never allowed. At times, she could almost hear his voice as it had been in her mind, though distant and never distinct.

More often, he would come to her and they would simply sit with each other. Sometimes, he seemed to only want to be near her, to feel that she was alive and there and it would settle whatever nightmares still haunted his mind.

Touching him was rare enough that she could count on her hands that amount of times that he allowed it, even after four years. He would sit and stare away as she smoothed her hands over his scars, icy rivers that traced his body, ironic in their appearance given how they had been created. He seemed to both loath and long for her touch, for skin contact and he could only cope with it for so long. There was no rhyme or reason, no clear trigger. One moment would be fine, the next he would ask her to leave, coiling up as if she were a predator and he defenceless. And, as soon as he felt defenceless, he would snap.

A force push was the most typical form. Oddly gentle, but still resolute and desperate to remove her from him. Once, he almost ripped the metal arm of the chair he clenched so hard. But not once did he unleash his temper on her.

And yet, she dreamed of a gloved hand closed into a fist and her breath tumbling from her lungs.

She wasn’t an idiot. She knew he killed. She’d always known that. She knew there were rumours about his temper, about the average length of service of anyone unfortunately incompetent. Jokes that there was no such things as redundancy in the imperial navy, only a transfer to serve under Lord Vader. 

She knew that the woman she had been would have taken Leia and run.

But that woman hadn’t seen the man that she loved broken beyond anything imaginable, hadn’t seen the brave glimpses of her love, trapped inside the shell in front of her. Hadn’t seen her husband come back from the Emperor, fresh wounds and scars for the bacta tank. That woman wouldn’t have known that she and Leia lived only by the Emperor’s grace and the strange stalemate that he and Lord Vader seemed to be locked in at the moment.

She wasn’t an idiot and neither was Palpatine.

Stalemates always ended eventually.

 

 

 

 

**Author's Note:**

> Hope you enjoyed!
> 
> And if you would like to check out more of my writing then see: https://www.amazon.co.uk/Porters-Lodge-Sins-Father-Book-ebook/dp/B07FK5QXJV/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1534373721&sr=8-1&keywords=porter%27s++lodge. 
> 
> :)


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